waffle

Monaural

MonoTouch has been misrepresented, initially by Gruber and by most people covering the debate over section 3.3.1. Probably because few of them have actually used MonoTouch or because they are not familiar with .NET. Probably folks think that MonoTouch is .NET, and .NET is Microsoft’s Java and draw their own conclusions.

MonoTouch brings the C# language and the core of .NET to the iPhone, but does nothing to provide a cross-platform UI experience or for that matter any sort of mobile device cross-platform APIs.

[..]

As a developer, I feel that I should be responsible for my technological choices. If I pick a cross-platform toolkit that looks horrible on the iPhone, it will just leave the space open for a competitor to do a better job. Or if my application does not take advantage of a new API in iPhoneOS, I am also leaving a flank open for a competitor to take over. Apple does not need to intervene with guidelines as the application quality, the AppStore, magazines, reviews and word of mouth are creating the conditions for an all-out darwinian survival of the fittest.

Comments

Miguel better watch out. He too will be slammed in a brutally honest blog post that leaves no wiggle room between its virile assertions.

I’ve spent two minutes trying to make sense of that sentence and I think your point is that Steve only mentioned the sucky Flash plugin rather than building entire cross-compiled apps. If that’s what you said, good point. He didn’t entirely leave it out (the in-control-of-our-own-destiny — because if there’s anything they lack, crave and desperately deserve, it’s control — segment) but he clearly hoped that we wouldn’t be able to avoid conflating the two.

My point was that cross-compile-app Flash is a worse native citizen than any MonoTouch app because you can’t easily wrap new APIs on your own in Flash, and that Flash-as-used-in-general is horrible.

Right, he spent most of his words beating up on their exclusion of the runtime because it’s the easiest target. I’m wrong to say that other people aren’t talking about the runtime, they are, but only because Android will have one this summer. The hand-wringing about its preemptive exclusion from the iPhone has long past, while the pain of missing it as a competitive feature is yet to come. And still uncertain.

Your point is well taken about MonoTouch. There are different degrees of absurdity here and Jobs’s trick of defending the most defensible and conflating it with the rest is obvious. Others have enjoyed conflating Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch as “closed systems” compared to, I don’t know, Richard Stallman’s personal build of the GNU operating system. When ethical arguments are this cut and dried, there’s nothing for those on the side of nastiness to do but misrepresent and bluster.